Framing and related concepts in interactional sociolinguistics

Introduction

‘Frame’ and ‘framing’ – along with related terms and concepts such as positioning, alignment, footing, stance, and speech activity – have been central to our field, interactional sociolinguistics, from its inception. In what follows, we give a brief overview of how these concepts have been defined and applied, and of insights they have yielded into (re)constructions of meanings, identities, and relationships, as well as the role of knowledge and memory in these processes. The negotiation of meaning in interaction, the formation of alignments and social groupings, and the presentation and contestation of identities are fundamental to social encounters, including those that make up the micro-level (inter)actions that create and propel social movements. We therefore suggest that an interactional sociolinguistic approach to the study of framing can be of interest and use for researchers interested in social movements.

The founder of the field now known as interactional sociolinguistics, John Gumperz, did not use the term ‘frame’ in his foundational paper (Gumperz, 1977) and book (Gumperz, 1982), though he did in later work. Nonetheless, at the heart of his theoretical and methodological framework is the insight that utterances in conversation can be interpreted only with reference to a ‘speech activity’ that is identified by what he calls ‘contextualization cues’: everything about how something is said, including, significantly, paralinguistic and prosodic features that many linguists had previously dismissed as ‘marginal’. ‘Speech activity’ is thus parallel to, if not synonymous with, what Bateson (1955/1972) and Goffman (1974) call ‘framing’. Davies and Harré (1990) propose ‘positioning’ as a corrective to Goffman’s ‘framing’, which, in their view, is too closely associated with ‘roles’ and therefore too static. Gordon (2015) observes that contemporary studies that use either framing (and Goffman’s, 1981 related notion of ‘footing’) or positioning illuminate the dynamic complexity of interaction.

A related theoretical framework later proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2005), ‘sociocultural linguistics’, highlights the insight that is also fundamental to Gumperz’ approach: that the linguistic means by which speech activities are signaled and interpreted vary by cultural background. It was this awareness of cultural influence that led Gumperz to develop the approach he initially called a theory of conversational inference, by examining ‘gatekeeping’ encounters between speakers of British English and speakers of English from India and Pakistan that resulted in the latter being underestimated and ill-served. The field of interactional sociolinguistics is thus grounded in a concern for social justice – a concern that characterizes many subsequent studies in this tradition as well. Indeed, Davies and Harré’s key example is arguably rooted in the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s: A man says to his ailing female companion, ‘I’m sorry I dragged you here’ – ‘here’ being a futile attempt to find a pharmacy. By responding, ‘You didn’t drag me; I came of my own volition’, his companion objects to being positioned as a helpless woman in a male chauvinist ‘storyline’.

This brief overview indicates the multidisciplinary nature of interactional sociolinguistic research: Bateson was an anthropologist, Goffman a sociologist, Gumperz a linguist who spent the greater part of his career in a department of anthropology, Harré a social psychologist, Davies a feminist social theorist, and Bucholtz and Hall linguists.

Interactive frames and knowledge schemas

Tannen (1985; Tannen and Wallat, [1987]1993) identifies two types of frames, each initially described by scholars in different fields and therefore reflecting the research focus of their respective fields. She reserves the term ‘frame’ for ‘interactive frame’, the sense of the term as used by Bateson and Goffman: what participants are doing – their understanding of what is going on – in an interaction. She uses the term knowledge schemas to refer to speakers’ assumptions and expectations about the world: people, objects, events, and so on. These differing types of frame reflect the academic fields from which the terms derive: Bateson and Goffman evince the concern of anthropology and sociology with human interaction, whereas research on what Tannen calls ‘schemas’ grows out of the focus on cognition that typifies research in the fields of psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistic semantics. (See Tannen, [1979]1993 for an overview of the terms and concepts as used by scholars in these varied fields.)

Tannen and Wallat demonstrate the difference between these two types of frames, and the way they interact, by analyzing an encounter in a university teaching hospital in the United States in which a pediatrician examines a child with cerebral palsy in the presence of the child’s mother. Early in the encounter, the mother tells the doctor that she hears her daughter ‘wheezing’ at night and therefore fears that the child is having difficulty breathing. The doctor reassures her that what she hears is not ‘wheezing’, a medical term that indicates difficulty breathing, but is simply ‘noisy’ due to the poor muscle control that is a symptom of cerebral palsy. Later in the visit, in the course of conducting a ‘standard pediatric evaluation’, the doctor, listening through a stethoscope, asks the little girl to take deep breaths. The mother interrupts to exclaim, ‘That’s the sound I hear at night!’ Her exclamation causes the doctor to stop examining the child in order to again reassure the mother that she need not worry about her child’s breathing. The mother’s interruption, which grows out of a mismatch in their schemas for health and cerebral palsy, causes the doctor to exit the examination frame and switch to a consultation frame. Thus frame identifies the activity the doctor is engaged in at any given moment, and the abrupt frame switch constitutes a disruption of, and challenge to, the doctor conducting the pediatric examination (and, as becomes evident in other examples, doing so while the interaction is being video-recorded for future use by pediatricians in training).

Tannen and Wallat present this analysis to demonstrate the power of a frames and schemas approach to elucidate participants’ experience of an interaction, in contrast to the linguistic notion of ‘register’, which simply identifies addressees. The doctor in this example uses distinct registers for each addressee: a high-pitched sing-song ‘motherese’ when talking to the child; a monotonic ‘reporting’ register whereby she uses technical terminology to describe what she is doing at each point in the examination for the benefit of medical students who will later watch the video; and an unmarked conversational register when addressing the mother. Yet distinguishing addressees does not capture the pediatrician’s experience of the interaction. During playback – a key element of interactional sociolinguistic methodology by which researchers show the video or play the audio for participants after the fact – the doctor expressed gratitude for evidence to explain why it is stressful to examine children in their caretakers’ presence. In her private practice, she explained, she asks adults accompanying her patients to remain behind a one-way mirror, so they can write down any questions they think of during her examination, and ask them after, rather than interrupting the examination to do so.

Tannen (2006) further demonstrates the power of a framing approach to elucidate individuals’ experience of everyday interaction by showing how an argument between members of a couple is reframed and rekeyed throughout a day. The argument was captured as part of a study by which four dual-income heterosexual American couples self-audio-recorded everything they said for a week. Early one day, as the couple and their 4-year-old son leave home, the mother spots a carton containing items she is returning to a department store that she has left by the mailbox for the letter carrier to pick up. She asks the father to take the box to the post office if the letter carrier doesn’t take it, since she will be away on a business trip. He says he’ll try but can’t promise because he might not have time. The argument begins as she challenges his assumption that anything he might have to do could prevent his performing such a simple task; then expands to revolve around who does more household chores; then leads the woman to express concern that if he can’t commit to such a small favor, he may not be there for her if she encounters serious problems at work. Each of these and subsequent reframings of what the argument is about is characterized by a rekeying, that is, a change in tenor or tone, as tension and negative emotions rise as the topic of the argument becomes increasingly significant, then gradually subside as the couple reframe their argument as a teasing, even good-humored discussion about their separation of labor. The final reframing and concomitant rekeying occur in the evening with a mutually reassuring agreement that arguments are a normal part of family life, and that their ability to resolve it is a positive model for their son to observe.

In her early work (Tannen, [1984]2005, 1986) and in many subsequent books and articles, Tannen builds on Gumperz’ notion of contextualization cues and Lakoff’s (1975) of communicative style to examine what she calls ‘conversational style’ in everyday interaction. Framing is central here too. Tannen shows that ethnic, regional, class, gender, and many other cultural influences shape speakers’ ways of signaling how their words are intended. Listeners tend to assume that others mean what they themselves would mean if they spoke in that way in that context. The assumption is likely to be relatively accurate when conversational styles are similar, but when conversational styles differ, that assumption can lead to misinterpretation of another’s intentions or abilities. For example, what Tannen calls ‘cooperative overlapping’ – talking along to show enthusiastic listenership and create conversational involvement – is often misinterpreted as interruption by those unfamiliar with that conversational strategy. Tannen notes that this and other strategies associated with what she calls a ‘high-involvement style’ among speakers of East European Jewish background can reinforce negative stereotypes of Jews and natives of New York City as aggressive and rude. In this as well as many others’ analyses of mutual misjudgment resulting from culturally-learned conversational style differences, negative assessments and negative cultural stereotyping can be traced in part to ways of speaking. When applied in conjunction with macro-analytic societal patterns of prejudice and discrimination, this micro-analytic perspective adds significantly to an understanding of the complex causes, manifestations, and potential for addressing discrimination and animosity experienced by members of different cultural groups.

Transforming and laminating frames

Whereas Tannen ([1979]1993) notes that there are different levels of frames, Gordon (e.g. 2009) delves deeply into, expands, and demonstrates the lamination of frames, which Goffman lays out in intriguing but fairly non-specific ways. Integrating frame analysis with intertextuality, a term by which Kristeva (1980) translates Bakhtin (1952–53]1986) concepts of dialogicality, Gordon analyzes the embedding, overlapping, and blending of frames in conversations among three families who audio-recorded their own interactions over the course of a week (the same study of which Tannen’s analysis of a family argument was a part). This unique data set allows Gordon to identify the source of current language in earlier interactions among the same family members. She thus shows how family members create complex understandings of the social situation and family-specific meanings, contributing to the construction of family solidarity and a sense of ‘familyness’.

Gordon (2002, 2009) suggests that participants laminate experience by enacting frames overlaid onto one another during a single moment in time. For example, Gordon (2002) demonstrates how, while a mother is talking on the phone, her nearly 3-year-old daughter is whining, screaming, and demanding cheese and crackers. The mother tells her that if she doesn’t quiet down, she will be given a ‘time out’. Several days later, during pretend play, the mother mimics her daughter’s screaming, and the child warns, ‘I’m on the phone right now! If you scream you will have a time out!’ Gordon observes at least three non-literal, or pretend, frame embeddings in this exchange. Within an overarching frame of real-life interaction, the mother and child are engaged in a play frame. Within the play frame is a role-reversal frame and a footing, describable as ‘I’m playing you’. Furthermore, they are enacting roles in a specific type of interaction: for the mother, ‘I am playing you in the role of misbehaving child’, and for the child, ‘I am playing you in the role of disciplinarian’. Identifying these embeddings allows an increasingly fine-tuned insight into the participants’ experience of, and creation of, family relationships.

Gordon (2008, 2009) also finds that frames can be intentionally blended, creating two simultaneous definitions of the social situation in a single moment. This can be seen when, at breakfast one morning, the father is engaged in pretend play with the same almost-3-year-old child. He plays the role of doctor, and the child plays the role of mother to a doll in the role of patient. As doctor, the father uses a low-pitched voice to inquire about the doll-patient’s ‘symptoms’, then says, ‘Here while I check her out, you drink this apple juice’. This utterance blends play with a parenting task: The father’s low pitch and terms like ‘symptoms’ indicate that the frame is doctor-patient pretend play; his juice-drinking directive advances their morning routine: the child needs to finish her breakfast. In other words, play and non-play (a parenting task) are accomplished at once. Other examples include the mother of this child blending the task of leaving the playground to get home to dinner with the play frame of a ‘race’, and the father in another family blending the activity of putting a shirt on his 2-year-old daughter with a game of peek-a-boo. In both cases, the frames are simultaneously not-play and play.

Gordon (2009) suggests the term overlapping frames to describe a type of lamination that is constructed when parents repeat strings of words from prior interactions in which they were both involved; she thus demonstrates how one utterance refers ‘simultaneously to two contexts of enunciation’ (Todorov, [1981]1984: 71). For example, when the aforementioned 2-year-old child falls from her chair while her mother is minding her (the child was not seriously injured), the father comments, using a smile voice, ‘How come she always seems to have an inordinate amount of accidents with Mom?’ This utterance critiques (in a somewhat humorous key) the mother’s parenting. However, it also does much more. The father’s words echo those the mother uttered earlier in the day when she called home from work to check in with him and the child. On learning that the child had fallen, she said, ‘How come a disproportionate amount of injuries and accidents occur when she’s under your care?’ By repeating linguistic material from this previous interaction, the father creates overlapping frames: He comments simultaneously on the mother’s parenting and on her prior criticism of his parenting. Having access to both interactions allowed the members of the couple – as well as the researcher studying their discourse – to discern these meanings.

In what might be regarded as a ‘meta’ study of the study, Gordon (2013) investigates how participants conceptualize their participation in the research project for which they self-recorded their conversations, how this shapes their talk to and about the study’s audio-recording equipment (and thus the footings they take up to the device as well as to the researchers who will later listen to recordings), and how they use the recorder as a resource for identity construction. Adding metadiscourse, or discourse about discourse, to her analysis of intertextuality and framing, Gordon (2023) turns her attention to English-language online discussion threads among posters on a website affiliated with a popular weight-loss app. She illuminates how metadiscursive activities – or frames – are constructed through various forms of intertextual connection, including the boards’ quotation function, deictic pronouns and symbols, and repetition at various levels of language and in multimodal forms. Through engaging in metadiscursive frames, posters define terms they use (e.g. ‘clean eating’), indicate what types of posts are appropriate and appreciated, advance competing perspectives regarding the challenges posters face, and solve problems. They also create shared ideologies about how communication and relationships work both offline and online, and in the context of weight loss. In other words, through participating in metadiscursive frames, which inherently depends on intertextuality, posters construct and do the work of their online community.

The studies briefly reviewed in this and the preceding section collectively show how the concept of framing as developed in interactional sociolinguistics contributes to understanding the complexity of human interaction and accounts for individuals’ experience of interaction, while showing how this complexity and this experience are created by linguistic, paralinguistic, and multimodal resources.

Interactional sociolinguistics and social movement research

Though studies in the field of interactional sociolinguistics have not focused on social movements per se, many studies in this tradition analyze what can be thought of as micro-moments of social activism and change. We will briefly mention a few such studies.

Ribeiro (1994) demonstrates the power of framing to shed light on otherwise seemingly incoherent discourse: a psychiatric intake interview with a Brazilian woman experiencing a psychotic break. Ribeiro shows that the woman is operating within two frames: In the interview frame, her discourse is incoherent as she fails to answer the psychiatrist’s questions and instead jumps from topic to topic, chants, sings, and assumes different voices and footings. However, Ribeiro shows, everything the woman says and does is coherent within each of the numerous frames she is operating within. For example, in some scenarios she is a child speaking to her mother, grandmother, or sister. Within each frame, she makes accurate use of knowledge schemas pertinent to the frame, such as the injunction against making noise in a hospital. Viewing the interaction through the lens of frames (and scripts) enables a groundbreaking understanding of psychotic discourse, arguably contributing to the social movement in support of the rights of those suffering from mental illness and associated with the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s.

Jones (2002) combines framing and positioning to examine the fleeting yet highly consequential interactions in which AIDS education activists in China hand AIDS prevention pamphlets to gay men in public spaces. Jones observes that when a man approaches another man in a public park, he is initially perceived as operating within either a ‘taking a walk’ frame or a ‘fishing’ frame, that is, seeking a sexual encounter. The AIDS activist must quickly–often, according to Jones, within a few seconds–switch to an AIDs education frame and position himself as a counselor in order to accomplish his task of delivering the pamphlet and raising awareness about AIDS prevention–an extremely consequential social movement during the AIDS crisis.

Simpson (2006) shows how ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners understand language testing situations either as a test-like interview or as a social conversation, how this influences their language production and how the encounter between the tester and the learner unfolds, as well as the consequences and implications of these processes for evaluators of proficiency. Examining workplace interaction in Spain, Prego-Vazquez (2007) demonstrates that differences in employee and customer knowledge schemas about whether their interactions are more conversational or institutional lead to the reproduction of social inequality. She shows that these differences in schemas are manifest in discourse. For example, customers’ uses of code-switching and introduction of conversational topics point to a conversational schema and lead to frame conflicts, such as when customers haggle over prices, a practice expected in the local market, that does not match employees’ expectations for contemporary institutional sales talk.

Examining the discourse of post-apartheid South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, Tovares (2016) shows that the testifiers and the TRC commissioners stray from the script associated with the knowledge schema of how a hearing unfolds in order to reframe the hearing as a social situation, thereby adjusting both the relationships between the participants in terms of power and solidarity and understandings of the truth of what happened during apartheid. This suggests that schemas regarding how particular contexts wherein changes in the social world are accomplished – not only hearings, but also political speeches, rallies, activists’ social media posts, and so on – can be diverged from in ways that adjust the definition of the unfolding situation frame moment-to-moment, amplifying previously silenced voices and offering new possibilities for understanding.

Su (2022) draws on notions of stance and framing in her analysis of online posts supporting and opposing same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Comparing posts by two Taiwanese mother bloggers, one for and one against, she shows that the blogger in favor of same-sex marriage linguistically creates parodic frames–primarily through the intertextual repetition of material drawn from posts of the other–to voice her perspective as part of a larger dialog. The blogger also linguistically creates non-parodic frames in which she evokes and aligns herself with what Su refers to as the cultural ideology (it could also be called a knowledge schema) of mothers as protective and loving, thus countering opponents’ framings of same-sex marriage as threatening traditional family roles. Wang (2020) also examines online discourse about same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Comparing Facebook comments on two same-sex marriage bills, he combines stance-taking and frames theory to illustrate the social process of knowledge production and conceptions of fact as commenters take part in and shape public discourse.

Conclusion

In sum, though few studies identified as interactional sociolinguistics address social movements per se, the field is grounded in a concern for social justice, and many studies conducted by scholars in the field and in closely related fields have addressed issues of social justice as well. Moreover, the application of frames and related theories and analytic methods provides ways of understanding the moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions that accomplish a variety of tasks and create and negotiate relationships and meanings of all sorts, including those that constitute social movements.